The need to convince any and all that will listen (and one's own self) that the Euro project must be preserved at all costs has never been so obviously politicized as the Nobel crony committee 'blessing' the European Union for bringing peace to a continent at war. While a laudable thing of itself, as JPMorgan's Michael Cembalest notes, by 1954, Germany had already become a stable, liberal, democratic society in one of the most amazing transformations in history given what preceded it ten years earlier.
Europe’s Nobel Peace Prize comes at a challenging time for the region
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One can argue whether the Marshall Plan, in avoiding the reparations policies following WWI, paved the way for this or not. In any case, it seems indisputable that conditions for a lasting peace in Europe were already in place by 1954, a point of view explained by Stanford’s James Sheehan in “Where have all the soldiers gone: The Transformation of Modern Europe”. The notion that the Euro is needed to cement these gains appears to be more about the ambition of specific political movements in Europe/Brussels than anything else. [The irony of the Nobel Peace Prize for Europe is that as shown below, it comes at a time of rising social stress, extremist politics, and a deterioration of trust in the very union that is supposed to be providing the social cement.]
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Nevertheless, Europe soldiers on with its project, out of the belief that a single-currency monetary union must exist in order to reap the benefits of a common European consciousness. The irony of the Nobel Peace Prize for Europe is that as shown below, it comes at a time of rising social stress. There are of course those who believe that the Euro itself has contributed to these developments: it distorted the regional current accounts and encouraged consumption not funded by national income in the South, exaggerated the severity of the recession, and then prevented currency adjustments which mitigated Southern European recessions in the past.
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Source: JPMorgan, full Cembalest report pdf [11]
A further question is whether now that the Norwegian Peace Prize committee has given its full endorsement to the EU project, does that mean that Norway itself will joyously partake in the "unionized" festivities as well? or will it remain on the outside, looking in, and providing the occasional hypocritical statement about how great things in the EU really are, even as it itself knows much better.
Perhaps Nigel Farage sums it up best...